Award-winning documentarian Amy Berg focused her camera on sexual abuse in Hollywood. Now she's paying a price for exposing an inconvenient truth.

Amy Berg rides shotgun in a car speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway, a blur of blue ocean beyond her window. "Five years ago some friends were in town and they invited me to a party at [director] Bryan Singer's house," says the filmmaker, 43, her thick, tawny hair in a high messy bun, long limbs tan against a white Mexican shift embroidered with flowers. "I stayed for like 15 minutes. I was really uncomfortable and I had to get out of there. It was really intense. It's like all these very young men, boys, running around in bathing suits and less, and a lot of older men in the industry." She adds, "It's kind of ironic. I was not thinking about making another documentary at the time."

Then in 2011, Berg got a phone call. Would she be willing to turn her lens on child sex abuse in Hollywood? She was in the process of finishing West of Memphis, which helped free three men wrongfully convicted of killing three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993 and exposed a deeply flawed local justice system. Four years earlier, her Deliver Us From Evil—which revealed how a pedophile priest had been shielded by authorities in the Catholic Church—had been nominated for an Oscar. Now two NYU grads—Matthew Valentinas, an entertainment lawyer, and his friend Gabe Hoffman, a partner at a hedge fund—were looking to produce a documentary. "I came up with the idea hearing Corey Feldman talk about what he'd been through," says Valentinas, referring to Feldman's revelations in interviews that he and others had been sexually abused as child actors. Valentinas adds, "It's not that Hollywood pedophiles are any different than the ones in a small town. But what they have to use is, instead of taking a kid out for ice cream, they're taking a kid on a jet to a movie premiere in London. The level of power these people have to influence is higher, and the level of sophistication of the people they groom is slightly lower, so it makes for a lethal combination."

Berg from an early age has had zero tolerance for injustice or systemic abuse. She agreed to scout it out with Katelyn Howes, a producer at Disarming Films, Berg's production company. "We hit the pavement and started asking around and knocking on doors," says Howes, who left her studio job at Warner Bros. after meeting Berg on West of Memphis. "The world we got into happened to be a world of man-on-boy abuse. There's a history of this type of activity with young performers, going back to ancient Greece. Young actors were always seen as sexual objects. More than any other industry, our culture looks at child actors [as if] they're getting something out of it too—they're getting a job. They're seen as not as innocent as the little kid who's getting abused in church. Which is blowing my mind. Smart people I spoke to showed that kind of bias towards these kids."

Berg and her team worked for two and a half years, interviewing and filming about 20 young men who claimed that as boys, they'd been abused by influential men in the industry. The filmmakers spoke to multiple talent agents who admitted their clients came to them with stories of abuse, but that to report it would result in the clients—and the agents—losing work. "It had been weighing on their consciences," Howes says. "They wouldn't put their name on it, but they led us to big leads that we put in the film. They want change. They don't want these kids to be abused."

Hence the title, An Open Secret, which, despite being made by a respected director of critically acclaimed documentaries, cannot find a distributor. "It's distressing she can't get distribution—it's a very powerful film," says Berg's close friend, the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (Enron, Taxi to the Dark Side). "It reminded me of that Billie Holiday song, 'God Bless the Child': 'Them that's got shall get/them that's not shall lose/so the bible said and it still is news.' It's a film about the victims, but it's about predatory behavior."

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At the center of the documentary is an investigation of the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a company founded in 1996 by tech entrepreneur Marc Collins-Rector, his much younger boyfriend Chad Shackley, and Brock Pierce, the child star of Disney's The Mighty Ducks and First Kid, who at 17 was earning $250,000 a year as one of DEN's vice presidents. The three raised more than $65 million in capital for what was then a unique idea: creating original streaming content targeting the Gen Y audience, starring teen boys in six-minute webisodes like Frat Ratz and Chad's World, in which a midwestern adolescent uncertain of his sexuality leaves home to live with his brother and the brother's boyfriend in an Encino mansion. The show was shot in an Encino mansion, the 12,600-square-foot M&C estate (Marc & Chad) that Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce called home.

Olivia Fougeirol

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Photo: Olivia Fougeirol

Before pleading guilty in 2004 to multiple counts of child sexual abuse, Collins-Rector was like a gay Jay Gatsby, famous for throwing countless parties at the estate attended by the likes of former Disney TV executive-turned-DEN president David Neuman, producer and director Gary Goddard, TV executive Garth Ancier, and director Bryan Singer, whose credits include several of the X-Men films and Superman Returns. All four men were named in lawsuits filed in 2014 by former child actor Michael Egan III. Egan alleged that from the age of 15 he was drugged by and coerced into having sex with Singer, Ancier, Neuman, and Goddard. All have denied the allegations, with Ancier filing a countersuit against Egan and his lawyer for "malicious prosecution." Singer has called Egan's charges "outrageous, vicious, and completely false." (Egan at least temporarily withdrew the suit in late August after a dispute with his lawyer.)

"I called a friend over at Fox studios after I read about the suit," says Valentinas, who co-executive produced An Open Secret. "And I said, 'What's everybody saying about Bryan Singer over there?' And he's like, 'Well, you know, if the new X-Men does pretty well, we'll probably bring him back.' Without even thinking about, What if all this is true?"

The combined gross of the first two X-Men films alone is more than $700 million worldwide.

Facing the ocean from her seat at Malibu's Nobu, Berg fishes for her phone in a burlap tote stamped BAD SEED. "Now David Neuman's friend wants to meet with me," she says, reading a text sent on behalf of DEN's former president. (In 2000 DEN filed for bankruptcy and sold off the furniture and equipment for pennies on the dollar.) An earthy beauty, Berg has an open face, determined features, and cornflower-blue eyes that don't so much see you as see into you—counting your brain cells, watching your heart beat, searching for something you might have hidden. You feel compelled to confess your secrets, which is what her subjects do, even those who are guilty.

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Carrying all those sins and heartaches and the dust of damaged souls takes a toll. "When I did West of Memphis, I met the mother of a child who was murdered and was unable to move on—it's very difficult to watch that," says Berg, who's divorced with a teenage son. "The biggest thing I've learned in the past couple of years is how to distance myself—meditation and yoga. That's helped me to create boundaries." Gibney, a producer on Berg's next project, a documentary on Janis Joplin titled Janis: Little Girl Blue, likens the job to that of a surgeon. "You can't get upset at the sight of blood," he says. "And you can't worry too much about the larger context when you're operating on a person. But you have to have a great bedside manner both before and after."

Watching Berg's work isn't easy. Beyond the inherently painful subject matter, there's the anxiety of knowing that sooner or later she's going to pin someone to the wall, alive and squirming (or in the case of the convicted pedophile priest Oliver O'Grady, bizarrely smiling and winking at the camera).

She recalls a scene in An Open Secret with Michael Harrah, a child-talent manager and then a member of the SAG Young Performers Committee. "The whole interview I was nervous because I knew what I had to ask him and I was like, What's going to happen when I do this?" Berg says. "So I said, 'Are you attracted to young boys?' and he said, 'Not particularly, no.'"

Now is as good a time as any to ask Berg a tough question. Has she been in a situation where someone in a position of power made her sexually uncomfortable? She hesitates. "Yes, it's not something I've ever talked about publicly," she says. "But it sucks. It happened when I was a teenager. It affected me more in my twenties. It became something that was haunting me for like five years. Then I told my parents, we talked about it, and we decided not to do anything about it. Literally the minute I told my parents, everything changed. I was able to go to therapy and not feel like I did something wrong. I got over it."

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Berg fixes me with a look both sad and sincere. "That's not the reason I did this film in any way, shape, or form," she says, "and I don't want it framed that way."

If you were to make a documentary on the documentarian, it might begin with a black screen, the sound of skates gliding on ice, then silence as the skater takes flight and the crack of ice upon landing a jump. Cut to a home video of a seven-year-old Berg in her purple costume (sewn by her mother), spinning, jumping. Her father, Mike, a retired electronics dealer, could provide the voice-over: "She started skating as a tot. She skated three shows a day, six days a week at Knott's Berry Farm. One show was called The Four Seasons. Amy was Spring."

After two years at UC Santa Barbara and then a year studying journalism at California State University, Northridge, Berg dropped out and landed at a desk in the CBS news division, where, she says, "I became the undercover person, because I knew how to use all the equipment."

Her first big story busted the L.A. County Sheriff's Department for not storing rape kits: "7,000 kits just disappeared!" Then she infiltrated a Russian crime ring that sold prescriptions for Vicodin and OxyContin out of a doctor's office. "This Eastern European woman was at the desk, and like a Nazi she would give you a code and hand you a prescription and boom, boom, boom, next person! I did the whole exposé on it and the guy got arrested." In 2004, while freelancing for CNN, producing a 10-minute piece on church pedophiles, Berg got the phone number of a defrocked Irish priest named Oliver O'Grady who had confessed to abusing more than 20 children, served seven years in prison, and been deported to Ireland. "No priest had talked at that time," Berg recalls. "I thought my boss would be so proud of me. And they didn't want the story. So I was like, maybe this is my time to leave."

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Olivia Fougeirol

Photo: Olivia Fougeirol

Berg had yet to dial O'Grady, and when she did, "He said, 'Hello and good evening.' I told him who I was and that someone was going to get this story. I told him I was coming to Ireland for Christmas—which I wasn't," Berg says. "So he said he'd consider meeting with me. I just booked a flight on my credit card."

The leap of faith led to Deliver Us From Evil and an Oscar nomination. "He ended up speaking because he was a victim as a child and wanted to talk about it," Berg says. "With all pedophiles, somewhere deep there's a victim in there—somewhere. It's a cycle and it needs to be stopped. Pedophiles are identified by a certain age, and it's young. Most have had something pretty traumatic happen to them."

In An Open Secret, Berg asks Michael Harrah, who himself was a child actor, "Did anyone ever try anything on you when you were a kid?" He replies, "Oh, I guess so…I suppose somebody did. I would be hard-pressed to remember anything specific. It wasn't uncommon, let's put it that way."

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"There was a sadness about him when he left. He shook my hand," she says. "I left and called the police and said, 'I'm worried about this person,' and gave his address. I just remember thinking, What if he kills himself and I didn't call them? I didn't know what he was gonna do. He seems to be fine."

But Berg is amazed that no one from SAG, which had a representative present at the interview, has asked to see An Open Secret. Such indifference makes her crazy. "I don't think anyone takes it very seriously. I think the industry has accepted it as an industry standard," she says. Case in point: former Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck, who is featured in the documentary and who was convicted in 2004 for lewd acts with a child. His IMDb entries include: "Has a cameo in X-Men and X-Men 2"…"The Suite Life of Zach and Cody (actor, 2006, 2007)"…"Registered sex offender."

"It's shocking," says Valentinas, "how little enforcement or regulation there is about who gets to work with children. Animals have more protections and rights on a film set than children do."

If a film on child sexual abuse in Hollywood is made and no one sees it, can it still make a difference? "When it first broke that I had this film, I received phone calls from people way above the people I usually talk to in the studio system, who really loved it. And then I couldn't get the support on the corporate level. They didn't want to touch it," Berg says. "That's a problem. I knew I was going to get some pushback. I didn't think it was going to be like this though." Never one to back down, she's releasing An Open Secret herself on November 7 at the ArcLight in Hollywood. It's a pricey play, and only one theater, but Berg hopes it will lead to a broadcast bid from a network like PBS or HBO or Showtime, or even Netflix. "I'm not as powerful as Bryan Singer, I'm just an independent film maker," she says. "But it will get out."

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Olivia Fougeirol

Photo: Olivia Fougeirol

Being independent, she's beholden to nothing except the work. But her controversial subjects are not keeping her from working. In addition to the Janis Joplin documentary, she's directed her first narrative feature, next year's Every Secret Thing, based on Laura Lippman's novel about two lower-class girls and a missing child. Like Berg's docs, it's not a feel-good film. What, you expected her to direct a comedy? "These stories are easier, in a weird way, because they're so much more real," she says. "The big, Hollywood happy ending—that's not life. I know what this is like; I've been in those kinds of houses before—those houses, those characters beaten down…And it's not getting any better." She laughs. "I'm a downer!"

"Amy was in her wheelhouse," says Diane Lane, who costars with Elizabeth Banks, Common, and Dakota Fanning in Every Secret Thing. "Human nature can be chilling. I admire her grit. Amy zeros in on what's possible and she doesn't flinch. She doesn't lack fear—she has courage despite it. Some people go toward fires, toward what would be alarming social behavior. She goes toward it with a camera. I haven't seen her doc, but I certainly know it's a hot potato."

Two weeks later Berg calls with an update. An Open Secret has been accepted at the DOC NYC film festival. "I spoke with David Neuman's lawyer," she says. "They say David made a strong effort to right the wrongs at DEN." She feels patronized. "He wants to look like a good guy. I said I would love to open the film up to him. I'd love to have someone that was right there in the middle of the scene come on the record and talk about it. Hey, I'd love to find out he's a man of integrity." Berg yells: "Find me a hero!"

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